


Sunlight Through Birch Leaves

by corialis



Category: The Sandman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:04:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corialis/pseuds/corialis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things you forget, and some things you remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunlight Through Birch Leaves

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Emma DeMarais in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge. With thanks to prodigy and tammaiya.

_"Sometimes old memories surface, like flotsam on the churning surface of the sea. And then they are gone." -- The 2nd Corinthian, The Kindly Ones_  
  
-  
  
Everyone forgets things.  
  
The smell of a lover you once had. The addresses of old houses you lived in. Calculus. How to curse in foreign tongues. Why he would have never worked out. Why you left. Names of old friends.  
  
You don't even know you've forgotten them, sometimes, until someone brings up a memory they thought you shared and you realize that you lost it somewhere along the way. Sometimes they come back to you in your dreams and when you wake up they hover at the edge of your consciousness, teasing you and throwing off the rest of your day. Sometimes they're just gone.  
  
-  
  
The library of the Dreaming has a special section for the forgotten things that people remember in their dreams. Just above books unwritten, past childhood flashbacks and relived moments.  
  
When it is 3 a.m. and Lucien can't sleep, he catalogues. Essentially, there's no need for this - the library has its order set whether Lucien's there or not - but these are the rare occasions when he's not in the mindset for reading.  
  
There is no 3 a.m. in the Dreaming, of course, just as there are no other times measured by such mundane clocks, but there's something about certain hours just the same. Hours where you've been up too long and things that wouldn't cross your mind in daylight suddenly make perfect, horrific sense and everything curls in on itself while your mind runs around in circles, when you don't know if you're suddenly finally thinking clearly or losing your mind.   
  
Lucien's never been one prone to insomnia, but when Dream is restless, it ripples. He has every title, author, and place of every book in the library memorized but can't remember what came before the library, whether it was his entire existence or if he had a life, once.  
  
The forgetting is what keeps him awake sometimes. Sometimes he thinks maybe he'll find his past life in a book that he has somehow overlooked.  
  
-  
  
Dream, too, is awake. He's flicking through the dreams of others like a long-delayed airline traveler flips through a magazine, glassy-eyed and unfocussed, like he'd rather be doing nothing but needs to do something so things at least seem less monotonous.  
  
Even Dream forgets things. He looks for them in other people's heads, as though he left them there long ago for safekeeping. Maybe he did.  
  
-  
  
Somewhere there is a dimly-lit hotel room where the day is dying, dust caught in the brief streams of sunlight filtering in through cheap curtains and dirty windows as they hit a slight red-headed girl. She curls at the top of a bed covered in a throw with a loud floral pattern vomited on it - back to the headboard, knees to her chest. Anyone could tell you that just because something's a dream doesn't mean it's fake, or happy.  
  
Yet as she begins to shrink, she smiles. A cloud passes the sun and the room fades into shadow, and when the sun returns the girl is gone, and a bird flies out the window.  
  
On the streets below, another girl carelessly drops a mirror on the sidewalk and smiles with teeth that are shards of glass.  
  
A third girl startles awake in her bedroom, looks at the red display of the clock glaring 3:30 in blocky numbers at her bedside and groans. As she rolls over, she shudders at the light glinting off her mirror for reasons she doesn't understand.  
  
"'S wrong?" her boyfriend mumbles.  
  
"Nothing," she says, with a half-shake of her head. "Weird dream, I think."  
  
-  
  
Hob Gadling has learned to go to sleep early whenever he can. He has done a lot of forgetting in his time, but has kept enough memories to make the absence of others all the sharper, and they follow him enough in daylight.   
  
\-   
  
An old man with a swan's wing for a left arm tends the back stairs of Dream's palace.  
  
He knows this was not his entire life. He was someone else once, who knew how big the sky was and who had a wife and daughter. He doesn't know where they are now.  
  
-  
  
 _"It's funny what you remember...Not funny ha-ha, the other funny. Me, I couldn't tell you what I did yesterday. My daughter, she came out over Whitsun, with her children, I couldn't remember their names. But I remember my childhood so clearly. I remember the names of the girl I shared a desk with, in Thornton Road Primary School. Prunella Wiper, it was. Such a funny name. I remember all our skipping rhymes, clear as day. My mother said, I never should, play with a gypsy in the wood...I remember so many things." --Magda Treadgold, The Kindly Ones_  
  
-  
  
Everyone has things they remember.  
  
The feeling of burying yourself in someone else's arms. How the glasses your eccentric neighbor wore looked exactly like your dead grandmother's. Sunlight on iced-over tree branches. What it feels like when they finally say "I love you" for the first time. What it feels like when you realize that they don't anymore. The name of every fish in your fish tank that you had when you were seven. The end of missing someone.  
  
You try to keep them forever. Sometimes you don't have to try, and can call them up whenever you desire. Other times they're harder to get to and you have to think about it. Sometimes you don't even know they're there until the light hits just right or you smell a stranger's perfume on the subway and everything comes back. Sometimes you want it to.  
  
-  
  
Lucien remembers the entire library, every inch.  
  
If he cannot remember his life before what it is now, at least his memories of life now are complete, and this satisfies him.  
  
-  
  
Dream can imagine every inch of the Dreaming. When he cannot remember Alianora's face, sometimes, he tells himself that it's enough.  
  
-  
  
The girl remembers her dreams once in a while. What it feels like to fly on the good days. What it feels like to be running through endless doors looking for something vital, something taken from her, and never reaching it on the bad ones.  
  
She remembers other things, too. Being kissed among sunflowers. Her mother reading her stories from a fat, blue Hans Christian Andersen paperback anthology before she fell asleep every night when she was young. When her cat was run over by a car. The punched-in-stomach nausea when forever really wasn't.  
  
\-   
  
In the brief moments where he wonders what death is like, Hob sometimes thinks that maybe the reason people decide to die is that they've acquired too many memories.  
  
There had been one moment when she had come to visit him, and he had scoffed and said she couldn't have him yet.  
  
"I'll only take you when you're ready," she had said with a smile. "I just wanted to check in."  
  
"Do you remember all of them?" he had asked. "Everyone you take?"  
  
Death had looked sad for a moment. "No. I have been here for a very long time, and there are very many people. But other people do."  
  
He keeps his memories in the back of his mind, because if he kept them all the time they would drive him mad. Remembering what you don't have never gets any easier.  
  
\-   
  
The man with the swan's wing for an arm knows that there are 53 stairs to the first landing, 70 after that up to the next level. He knows precisely how to fix them and where the dust hides in the corners and which banister to take more care with than others.  
  
He knows he was loved once, and if he tries, he can glimpse in his mind the size of the sky.  
  
-  
  
 _"But then, if I have to die, I have lived an interesting life...and a varied one...and I...take with me the memories of all the things that have moved me...told me I was alive. The green play of sunlight through birch leaves...A kiss...once...on the cheek...from a friend..." -- Fiddler's Green, The Kindly Ones_


End file.
